living your best life

Yes, it is my first blog post of 2018. The last I wrote specifically for Creative Potager was December 21, 2017. I have been waiting for some kind of clarity or direction that I wanted to take us next. None has surfaced. Instead, I woke this morning with a desire to assess, summarize and begin again to just write notes to you as needed. A painter’s life seems to be like that. There are these short pauses during an overall incompleteness of painting, organizing, showing, and shipping paintings to new homes. Writing posts and sharing often comes in fits and starts and then ebbs away for a bit. I have learned to trust this process and let it be what it is.

The light of a resting catches a surface.

The brushes seem to linger over a canvas and then it is moved and another takes its place. The work continues for a bit and then it too is moved and yet another is set on the easel.

One brush mark after another, a new shiny wet painting begins to appear.

At the moment I have no answer for them. But we will get there. They are designated for a show about trees in May. The reason they have come home of course is there is the two artist exhibition “Earth & Water: A Conversation on Edge” with Elena Maslova-Levin that will open April 13th. I am still waiting impatiently for eight of her paintings to find their way to the island. They have traveled promptly from California and then been held up between Richmond and Nanaimo for better than a week. I have cleared the gallery, put up posters around the island and done everything I can think of to open up the energy flow for their arrival. Now we wait… some more.

This 16 x 20 inch oil on canvas “Evening View Over Navy Channel” commissioned painting is ready for travel to the United States now that the new special shipping boxes has arrived.

I am also critically low on small 8 x 10 inch painting sketches as we head into the busy season. I have one left. Just one.

Then there are painting lessons to prepare and present each week to eager and dedicated students.

My husband is making his breakfast and we confirm that we will go to figure drawing in the evening. It is his area of interest but it is also good for a landscape painter to practice this kind of unforgiving drawing. And it is something we can do together with others, a date night of sorts. 😉

Easter weekend is coming up and if the weather is decent my daughter and two grandsons plan on coming to camp in the local campground and visit.

My parents have three calves on the ground already this spring in rural north central British Columbia and dad has a snow fence built as it has been a long deep snow winter up there. They are in their eighties and still farming. I phone on Saturday mornings to catch up and visit. I have to phone early or I miss catching them in the house. Rural farm life is like that.

But right this very moment, I must get the six-inch thick bundle of receipts and invoices to the city and handed over to the accountant so that our income tax will be filed on time.

As you can see, there are a whole series of projects at various stages of incompleteness between new works needed, finished works, exhibitions coming up and work to be shipped and so on. There are also various relationships that are important to me that I must make room for between the demands of a painter. But I am still here, sipping my morning coffee, listening to the rain on the tin roof and smiling into the possibilities of today. This is not a small thing. I have lost several friends, some of them fellow painters, before their 70th birthday’s this year. I will be sixty years old this summer and I know that each day I wake and then settle into the soft quite of the evening is a gift. I assess, revisit and conclude – I am doing what I must do as a painter and a teacher of painting. I am doing what I need to do as a partner, mother, grandmother and daughter. I am doing what I love to do in the process of being in all areas of my life. I have no desire to change a thing. It is a good feeling.

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There are times when I deliberately choose the long way around. I would say it is for the pure pleasure of physical engagement but that wouldn’t be entirely true and my left shoulder would agree. Mostly, I suppose, it is about getting to know a place that has me on my knees – with knee-pads, screwdriver, old palette knife, steel wool, a couple of rags and the most important ingredient – paste wax.

It all began when I was taking off some old duct tape glue left behind on the 1925 fir flooring. Can guess what happened? Well, that spot looked so nice, I started in the far corner and started working my way across the room. This morning I am about three-quarters of the way finished and hope to be done by noon. We shall see what my shoulder and wrists have to say about the timeline, may take until Friday. But it does feel good! As I work I draft things in my head like a page on the website for the new Terrill Welch Gallery. I think about how the hanging gear is going to go up. I muse about all the people who have shared this little piece of land in the past… it is a long list and mostly unrecorded. I watch how the light moves around the room and know I am not the first and hopefully won’t be the last to enjoy it. I make mental notes on the other artists whose work I would to see having a conversation with mine in the months to come. These are good enough reasons to rub the wax on and rub the excess wax off the floor, by hand.

Oh, I still wonder off for our walks most days. Dinners still need to be cooked and clean laundry is hung out to dry. Plein air painting still happens and the bills get paid. Yet, part of me feels like this arbutus tree who has out grown its bark and the underside is green and fresh. I am still the same tree but a new skin is surfacing.

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Try as I might, the mix of experiences this past week refuse to be organized into a meaningful story. It all feels like beautiful colours tangled into a day with no breaks in the string, no long pauses and no rest points. New projects, such as getting a gallery up and running, are often like this I think. The past seven days went something like the late ferry sunset building to a perfect moment.

With a couple of thoughts about the morning’s plein air painting time with a fellow painter and friend,

And another thought about the gyroscope jewellery coming in mail from another multi-talented painter and jeweler friend,

and it is over…

As the sun drips into the sea, we turn away preparing for night and see the almost-full moon reaching out to greet us.

In this flow of melded time, knowing one of these moments, someday, will be our last, one is often tempted to think about the strange concept of forever.